Visual and Material Perspectives on East Asia

Dear friends of VMPEA and RAVE,

We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, November 21, from 4:45 to 6:45 pm CT at CWAC 152 for the joint VMPEA-RAVE workshop this autumn. The workshop features:

Zhiyan Yang

Collegiate Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Harper-Schmidt Fellow, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“‘Only One in U.S.’: Ling Long Art Museum and the Architecture of Displaying Chineseness in Chicago Chinatown”

Discussant: Jeremy Lee Wolin

PhD candidate, School of Architecture, Princeton University

This workshop will take place in hybrid format. For those of you who would like to join online, please register here. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Interior view of the Ling Long Art Museum, hand color photo cards, Art Colortone /linen, Curt Teich postcard & Co. ca. 1930s.

Abstract:

Founded in 1933 in response to Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, the Ling Long Art Museum 琳琅美术院 in Chinatown claimed to be the first Chinese-run museum in the United States. Housed in a building with a stylized “Oriental” façade designed by Western architects, Ling Long functioned simultaneously as a cultural institution and a commercial storefront.

This paper examines how the museum’s hybrid interior, comprised of historical and cultural dioramas, religious artifacts, and souvenir displays, outlined the fraught terrain between cultural representation and economic survival for an immigrant community with limited resources. Unlike the spectacular and exoticized portrayals of China at World’s Fairs, Ling Long sought to establish a sustained cultural presence within a racialized urban fabric. I argue that the museum’s spatial improvisations, shaped by transcultural aspiration and material constraint, embodied a layered historicity: one that blurred the lines between art and commerce, history and ethnography, preservation and placemaking. At its core, this paper asks who gets to define “Chineseness” —both in diaspora and beyond—and how such definitions are constructed through architectural and curatorial strategies. By foregrounding this case study of vernacular museology, the paper reframes Ling Long not as an isolated, bygone experiment, but as part of a longer genealogy of museums as contested sites storytelling, identity, and negotiations.

Bios:

Zhiyan Yang is an architectural historian whose research spans the art and cultural history of the built environment in East Asia in the long twentieth century. His interests lie in the intersection of non-Western traditions and modernism, the theory and historiography of Chinese architecture, contemporary art and visual culture in East Asia, and diasporic architecture. His book project deals with the shifting architectural culture in post-Mao China as the country’s built environment pivoted from Socialist to contemporary era. Yang earned a B.A. in Art History from Sarah Lawrence College and completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Before his current position as a collegiate assistant professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow, he also served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities in the school of architecture at Princeton University.

Jeremy Lee Wolin is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture and Prize Fellow in the Social Sciences at Princeton University. He studies the impact of race, design, and the state on architectures of social welfare. His writing has appeared in Planning Perspectives, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and the Journal of Urban History. Currently, he is also serving as co-chair of the Society of Architectural Historians’ Asian American and Diasporic Architectural History Affiliate Group.

Dear friends of VMPEA,

We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, November 7, from 4:45 to 6:45 pm CT at CWAC 152 for our second VMPEA workshop this autumn. This workshop features:

Guanhong Liu

MAPH 2nd Year, UChicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Hanging Stones, Hidden Implications: Travel, Natural History, and Stalactites in Ming Paintings”

Discussant: Chen-yuan David Chuang
PhD Student, Department of Art History, UChicago

Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Dear friends of VMPEA,

Professor Zhao Feng

Dean and Professor, School of Art and Archaeology, Zhejiang University

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“How the Evolution of the Loom Shaped Early Silk Design: A Case Study in Technical Art History”

A dinner reception will follow at the CWAC lounge

*This workshop is co-sponsored by the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago

We hope to see many of you there!

Abstract:

• The shaft pattern looms and the forming of pattern style of woven silks in the Han dynasty.
• The changes in loom and pattern from warp faced to weft faced woven silks from the 3rd-5th centuries.
• The development of medallion patterns and drawloom during the Sui and Tang dynasties, the 6-7th centuries.

Bio:

Dear friends of VMPEA,

We cordially invite you to join us next Friday, May 16, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for the sixth VMPEA workshop this spring. The workshop features:

Amy McNair

Professor of Chinese Art History, the University of Kansas

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Thinking about the Life of the Object: a Chinese Seal-stone”

**This event is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago with generous support from a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

This workshop will take place in-person only. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Image credit: Xu Sangeng (1826-1890), attr., Seal-stone, soapstone, 3” h., collection unknown. Image in the public domain.

Abstract:

I am working on the “social life” of a Chinese seal-stone that was probably made by Xu Sangeng (1826-1890). For this workshop, my questions concern approaches to the “life of the object” and ideas about interpreting objects. Where do you think objects sit on the spectrum between animacy/agency on the one end and direct expressions of the artist’s personality, emotions, or political views on the other end? Are they simply commodities? Do they have the power to spark affinity? Further, is the only legitimate approach to objects the interpretive schemes of modern, western-trained art historians? How do we responsibly employ modern approaches unknown to pre-modern people, or how should we work from methods and interpretive strategies that were known to them? Let’s discuss!

Bio:

Amy McNair is Professor of Chinese Art History at the University of Kansas. She is Editor-in-chief of Artibus Asiae and a founding Board Member of the Association for Chinese Art History. Her research areas include Chinese calligraphy and Buddhist sculpture, and her current focus in teaching is the garden culture of Japan and China. Her book, The Painting Master’s Shame: Liang Shicheng and the Xuanhe Catalogue of Paintings, was published by Harvard Asia Center in 2023.

We cordially invite you to join us this Friday, Feb 21, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for the fourth VMPEA workshop this winter. The workshop features:

Mengge Cao

Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Art History, University of Chicago

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“The Expanded Surface of Painting in Middle Period China” 

Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

We hope to see many of you there!

Detail from Reading in an Open Hall (Fengyan zhanjuan 風檐展卷). Leaf. Ink and color on silk. 24.8 x 25.2 cm. National Palace Museum.

Abstract:

The development of painting formats in Middle Period (750-1300) China was often portraited as a linear progression, emphasizing the decline of mural tradition and the growing prevalence of scroll mountings. This reductive narrative oversimplifies the dynamic interactions among diverse painting formats and limits our understanding of historical viewers’ experiences. This research proposes a “surface-oriented” framework that broadens the scope for exploring the ontologies and functions of paintings during this period. In his influential book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), James J. Gibson argued that surfaces provide the essential affordances for perception and action, serving as the primary interface between an organism and its surroundings. Surfaces serve as the interface through which humans and animals navigate the world, traversing the boundaries of objects, the self, and others. They provide the contexts and relationships that connect things, bodies, and environments. This framework repositions surfaces as a critical lens to examine the roles of paintings on furniture and utilitarian objects, as well as the emergence of independent mounting formats such as hanging scrolls, handscrolls, and leaves. By focusing on surfaces, paintings are no longer seen as static entities in fixed categories but as dynamic, conceptual, and material processes that actively shaped the experiences of historical viewers. In this workshop, I will present a work-in-progress exploration of this “surface-oriented” framework and analyze selected art objects to illustrate its potential for rethinking the development of painting formats in Middle Period China.

Bio:

Mengge Cao is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) in conjunction with the Department of Art History. His research examines the development of painting formats in Middle Period China (750–1350), with a special focus on the relationship between painting’s objecthood, perceiving bodies, and the built environment. He is also interested in exploring the agency of reprographic technologies in East Asian art history. At CAEA, Mengge is responsible for providing research content, developing the curatorial narrative, and writing labels for the exhibition related to the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP). Mengge received his PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. In his dissertation “Small-Size Painting and its Viewership in Southern Song Dynasty China, 1127–1279,” Mengge conducts quantitative analyses of nearly 1,500 entries from the “Song Dynasty Painting Database” and argues that small-size paintings gained medium specificities at the turn of the late twelfth century and facilitated interpersonal communication among emperors, imperial families, and courtiers in the Inner Court.

We cordially invite you to join us on Friday, Feb 14, at 4:45-6:45pm CT, CWAC 152 for the third VMPEA workshop this winter. The workshop features:

Xuemiao Wang

Visiting PhD Student, Art History, UChicago | PhD Candidate, Zhejiang University

Who will be presenting the paper titled:

“Fans in the Tombs: Echoes of Elegance and Ritual from Ming Dynasty Folding Fans” 

This workshop will take place in-person only, and the Q&A session will be conducted in both Chinese and English. Please see the abstract and bios for this workshop below.

Geometric-patterned gold-sprinkled bamboo folding fan with gold paper, unearthed from the tomb of Zhu Shoucheng

Abstract:

The phenomenon of folding fans unearthed from Ming Dynasty tombs is particularly notable in 27 burial sites and 89 folding fans concentrated in the Jiangnan region. These burial items were especially prevalent during the mid-to-late Ming period, reflecting the cultural trends and funerary practices of the time. Findings indicate that painted fans and plain white paper fans were widely used as burial items in Jiangnan tombs, a practice that first appeared among commoners before gold-decorated fans were incorporated into the aristocratic “burial clothing (lianyi 殓衣)” system. The evolution of folding fans from luxury goods to significant burial objects showcases the Ming fascination with material culture. Gender and social disparities in the distribution of burial fans are evident, with female tombs often containing more exquisite examples. Understanding the phenomenon of Ming Dynasty burial fans requires attention not only to the literati’s aesthetic preferences and the “burial clothing” customs but also to the material characteristics of Ming tombs. Folding fans were not only included as functional items but were accompanied by a variety of other personal possessions and cultural commodities, the number and diversity of which far exceeded those of earlier periods. The Ming obsession with material possessions is vividly reflected in the transformation of burial objects. Jiangnan tombs had unique historical conditions that favored the inclusion of burial items. When viewed in this context, the burial of gold fans in Ming tombs ceases to appear as an isolated or exceptional phenomenon. Instead, it becomes an integral part of the distinctive commercial and funerary culture of the Ming Dynasty.

Bio:

Xuemiao Wang 王雪苗 is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Zhejiang University and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago for the current academic year. Her research focuses on Chinese funerary paintings from the 6th to 13th centuries, with a particular emphasis on tomb screen imagery. Her dissertation examines the primary characteristics and formal transformations of tomb screens during this period, using these changes to explore broader shifts in funerary culture between the Tang and Song Dynasties. In addition to her work on tomb screens, she is also interested in other forms of funerary art, including hanging scrolls found in burial contexts. Her current article on folding fans unearthed from Ming Dynasty tombs investigates the sudden incorporation of cultural commodities into funerary traditions, reflecting broader intersections of material culture and burial practices.